after photography.

The End of Visual Evidence

It’s a few years from now. A photo surfaces of something that matters: a protest, an accident, a natural disaster. You watch it. You feel something. You assume it’s fake. You scroll past.

The photograph might be real. Someone might have captured a genuine moment of truth. You’ll never know, and you’ve learned not to care. Unverified visual content has become an illustration; you engage with it the way your ancestors engaged with paintings. Evocative, possibly meaningful, but not evidence. Never evidence.

Welcome to the world after photography.

Uncharted Territory

For nearly two centuries, the camera served as a mechanical witness. “The camera doesn’t lie” was never literally true; manipulation existed from the earliest days of the medium, but it was functionally true. Creating a convincing fake required resources, expertise, and time. The barrier was high enough that we could treat photographs and video as default evidence, from our newsdesk, to our scientific papers, and our courtrooms.

That barrier is gone.

But here’s what makes our current moment unprecedented: we haven’t simply lost trust in images. We’ve lost it even as we’ve lost the older structures that governed trust in text. Before photography, people navigated information through institutional gatekeepers, publishers, newspapers, and broadcasters with reputations to protect and licenses to lose. The barriers to reaching a mass audience were high, and they served as a rough filter for credibility.

Those structures have eroded. Anyone can publish. Algorithms amplify engagement, not accuracy. And now, the one thing that seemed to anchor us to shared reality, the visual document, the thing we saw with our own eyes, is dissolving into uncertainty.

We’re not returning to 1838. We’re somewhere else entirely.

The Cusp

This isn’t speculation about a distant future. We are living through the transition right now, and it will complete itself within the next few years.

The technology to generate photorealistic videos of events that never happened exists today. The cost is approaching zero. The time required is approaching seconds. What remains is adoption, the normalization of doubt, the moment when “is this real?” becomes the default response to any visual content.

That moment is close. You can feel it in the hesitation before you share something. In the disclaimers news organizations now routinely include. In the new genre of social media post that exists solely to debunk something that was never real in the first place.

The shift isn’t coming. The shift is here. We’re just waiting for everyone to notice.

The Liar’s Dividend

Some people believe they will benefit from this transition. Certain elected officials, certain executives, certain public figures have noticed that the machinery of accountability is weakening. No more gotcha footage. No more incontrovertible evidence. Everything can be denied, and “that’s AI” is now a plausible response to any accusation.
They’re wrong to celebrate.

The same tools that let you deny authentic footage will be used to fabricate footage of you. The same erosion of trust that protects you from accountability will be weaponized against you without warning. In a world where nothing can be proven, no one is safe, including, especially, those who thought they were dismantling the system to their advantage.

The liar’s dividend is a loan, not a gift. It will be collected.

The Fraction

Here is an uncomfortable truth: only a small fraction of the population will ever actively seek provenance.
This isn’t new. Most people have never read primary sources, verified claims independently, or traced information back to its origin. They relied on gatekeepers, editors, publishers, and broadcast standards departments to do that work on their behalf. Trust was delegated, and for the most part, the system functioned.

The problem is that today’s gatekeepers aren’t the same. A platform’s algorithm optimizes for engagement, not truth. A social media feed has no editorial standards. And legacy publishers have become beacons of biased information, serving a very specific point of view. The institutions that once filtered information before it reached mass audiences have been disintermediated, replaced by systems with no will or obligation to verify anything.

So we face a choice. We can try to rebuild gatekeeping structures, new institutions, new standards, and new barriers between fabrication and audience. Or we can build systems that allow anyone to verify authenticity without depending on a gatekeeper at all.

Both paths have costs.

Truth as Luxury

If verification requires effort, education, or access to paid tools, what happens to truth?
Consider the trajectory. Reliable news increasingly sits behind paywalls. Verification tools require technical literacy. Understanding provenance metadata demands education that most school systems don’t provide. The skills to navigate an environment of synthetic media are not evenly distributed, and they won’t become evenly distributed quickly.

We may be heading toward a world where access to verified reality is a class marker. Those with resources, education, and time will inhabit a sphere of authenticated information. Everyone else will swim in an undifferentiated sea of content, unable to distinguish between documentary and fabrication, between report and propaganda.

This is not a technological outcome. It’s a policy choice. The question is whether we make authentication accessible and universal, or allow it to become another luxury good.

The Alternative

There is another path. Content Credentials, the implementation of the C2PA standard, offers a model for authentication without centralized gatekeeping. The principle is straightforward: cryptographically sign content at the point of creation, record every subsequent edit in tamper-evident metadata, and let anyone inspect that chain of custody.

If it works, if adoption becomes widespread, we get something remarkable: a way to verify authenticity that doesn’t depend on trusting a platform, a publisher, or an institution. The credential travels with the content. Anyone can check it.
But adoption is the hard part.

Content credentials require camera manufacturers, software companies, platforms, and publishers to implement standards consistently. They require users to understand what credentials mean and to develop the habit of checking for them. They require a public that has been trained for two centuries to trust images automatically to learn an entirely new behavior.

This is not a technical problem. It’s an education problem. And education at this scale takes decades. And that’s in the best-case scenario. Some countries might impede the process in hopes of political gain. After all, a confused population is easier to govern than one well-informed.

 

What This Means

For brands: Visual content will be questioned by default. The absence of provenance metadata will become a liability. Consumers, journalists, and regulators will increasingly expect authentication, and its absence will be interpreted as suspicious or fake.

News organizations will need to prove footage is real and do so in ways audiences can verify independently. Reputation alone will no longer be sufficient. The credential will matter as much as the masthead.

For institutions, the documentation relied upon, surveillance footage, medical imaging, and legal evidence will face new challenges. Courts and regulators will need new frameworks for evaluating visual evidence. Those frameworks don’t exist yet.

Individuals will need to develop new instincts. The habit of asking “where did this come from?” will become as essential as the habit of looking both ways before crossing a street. Some people will develop this habit. Many won’t.

Organizations can assess their readiness for this transition. Maturity models exist for understanding where they stand, from organizations that have never considered authenticity to those that have embedded provenance throughout their content supply chain. Knowing where they are is the first step toward knowing where they need to go, and at what speed.

The World After Photography

The camera gave us something extraordinary: a mechanical witness that seemed to transcend human bias. That witness is dying. What replaces it depends on choices we make now , about standards, about education, about who has access to the tools of verification.

We can build a future where authenticity is verifiable and universal. Or we can drift into a future where truth is a luxury, and most people simply give up trying to tell the real from the fabricated.

The technology exists for either outcome. The question is which future we choose to build.

 

Main Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț